BOUCHON, YOUNTVILLE

With so many friends visiting for Kjell and Huong's wedding, we decided to take a trip up to Napa to spend some time together and visit a few wineries. Of course, we had to have a great meal, and started the day with a lunch at Thomas Keller's Bouchon. Now, I've actually been to Bouchon before, but it was years ago, right after it had opened, and I went to a New Year's Eve dinner with my family. I didn't think it was all the spectacular at the time, but it was worth another try.

We didn't have reservations, but since we arrive fairly early in the day, they were able to accomadate us. They started off by serving us a lovely warm baguette along with some butter.

I wasn't actually that hungry, so I decided I'd just have a salad and soup. Of course, I did order a pretty heavy salad and soup. I started off with a duck confit salad served on frisee with poached cherries and pickled turnips. Let me say, this dish was wonderful. The duck was cooked perfectly and was soft and delicious. The pickled turnips were really well done- crisp, tart, and still tasting of turnips and lastly the cherries. I'm not a fan of cooked fruit, especially if it's going to be served to me cold, but those cherries really were great.

I then ordered a traditional onion soup. It was actually much heavier that what I wanted, but the only other soup involved fennel and I hate fennel. So I had this bowl of soup, covered in an enormous layer of cheese. It was too much for me. I had a few bites of it before I gave up and handed it over to Juliet to finish off. (She's kinda like Tom, finishing off the things I'm always too full to eat).

Overall, we had a really enjoyable lunch at Bouchon. The service was friendly, everyone enjoyed their dishes and other than the slightly high price tag (which we expected) it really did meet all our high expectations.

UBUNTU, NAPA

Ok, I know you hear it from me all the time, but I've been really busy and it's been hard to keep up with the blog posts. I make up for this by doing a whole bunch on posts at once, so just get used to it- my busy schedule isn't going to be changing any time soon.

So about a month ago, my parents came up to Napa with their friends for the weekend. They initially were just planning on coming down to have dinner with us at some point, but then my dad decided he wanted to go golfing- and he needed my car. So Tom and I had to go up to Napa, give my dad my car and then spend the rest of the day driving my mom and her friends around. So to make the trip worth it, I made sure that I made reservations at a restaurant that I've wanted to eat out for some time, Ubuntu.

You may have heard of Ubuntu, because it's gotten amazing reviews since it opened at last year. It's the restaurant with yoga studio on top, well known for it's take on vegetarian cuisine. In fact, Frank Bruni called it the second best new restaurant in the U.S. this year. I was able to get us an early reservation, right when the place opened, so when we first arrived, the place was basically empty. Here's a shot of the interior.

Being a yoga studio, it had a zen-like feel, but I liked the high ceilings, stone walls and big windows. The restaurant is big into sharing, so I did the ordering for the table, starting with a number of small starters, continuing with entrees and then finishing with some desserts.

For the small starters, we got a number of dishes:

Lavender dusted marcona almonds (though I didn't really taste the lavender)

Polenta fries (I liked the red pepper coulis it was served with)

And my favorite of the three starters, fresh veggies pickled in white wine. I like the sweet/sour/crunchiness of this dish.

Next up, I ordered two salads:

This is a beet salad with red quinoa. I liked the colorful presentation a lot. Plus, I'd never had red quinoa before- it was quite tasty and had a much better texture than the quinoa I make at home. It was much springier and I hope to find it and try to cook it myself at home. I also like the texture of the avocados along with the beets.
We also ordered a second salad, which I'm surprised that I didn't photograph because my mom's friend liked it so much that we ended up ordering two of them. It was a green salad made with a bunch of different baby greens and it also had strawberries it in. It was pretty tasty, since the greens that they chose were so flaorful and I did like it quite a bit.

And then I ordered three larger plates, which really weren't all that big, but along with everything else, it ended up being just enough. The first dish was a farro dish with peas. Again, it's a really lovely presentation, and I thought it was pretty good.
My favorite dish of all, though, was this mushroom pizza with an egg on top. You might think the egg sounds kinda crazy, but it tasted great when you cut the runny yolk and it gets all over the pizza. Plus, the mushrooms were super fresh and just very nicely done.
Lastly, we ordered their signature cauliflower dish, which is basically a mini cast iron pot filled with cauliflower in many different ways- making all different tastes and textures. Frank Bruni raved about this dish, but it wasn't my favorite thing. I guess having all those textures and flavors in one pot caused them all to just get lumped together. So even though it tasted good, I didn't find it as amazing as people have said it is.
We finished our meals with two shared desserts (no photos of that). Overall, I did like Ubuntu, but I won't be running back there any time soon. I found the food quite yummy, but was it amazing enough for a second visit? Not for me. I do like vegetarian stuff, but I guess I like more simple things, and maybe Ubuntu was just too innovative for me.

A LIGHT LUNCH A BOUCHON BAKERY

This is a rather delayed post, so I doubt that most of you will find it, but I feel it worth putting up, since I'm writing about a rather well known place. So last month my friend Matt was in town visiting and I decided to take him up to Napa for a few hours. We stopped for lunch at Bouchon Bakery, of course founded by the famous Thomas Keller, and located in St. Helena next to the original Bouchon.

This place is famous for its breads and pastries, and I knew it'd be a bit pricey, but I splurged after the drive up. For lunch, I ordered this veggies sandwich.

It was very tasty, served on thick slices of homemade bread with well grilled veggies and a nice basil sauce. I also picked up a number of desserts for dinner later that night, and you can see them below.

We had little tastes of all my favorite flavors represented: an apple tarte tatin (my all time favorite dessert, especially if I'm making it), a chocolate tart and a passion fruit tart. The apple tarte tatin was ok, I like mine more warm and the pastry cripser. The passion fruit was very tasty, but had raspberries mixed in, and I'm not a fan of raspberries, so the chocolate tart was my favorite, and in my opinion, the prettiest one.

Overally, I enjoyed my treats from Bouchon Bakery. I'd also gotten Tom some bread and though he liked the baguette more than the ones from Acme, they still weren't as good as the ones at Clear Flour. So I look foward for my next trip back to Napa, to pick up more treats from Bouchon Bakery.

NEW YEAR'S DAY IN NAPA

There are many reasons why we moved from Boston to CA, but New Year's Day just reminded me even more of why we moved. While Boston was finishing the month getting the most snowfall it'd ever had in over 30 years in December, we were spending the day in Napa, where it was a sunny 60F, clear and beautiful. Ok, admittedly we'd gotten rather lucky. It'd been raining a few days before, and we currently have a downed tree in our back yard after a day of torrential rains yesterday. My little sis had come up to visit and she wanted to take her bf, Ben, to Napa. Tom had also never been, and I invited Kjell and Huong who are also in town (and they brought along a friend and Huong's mom). So all of us spent the day in Napa.

We started off by visiting V. Sattui. It's a winery, but it's more well known for its well stocked gourmet marketplace and picknicking area. After spending a while picking out the meats, cheeses and breads we wanted for lunch, we headed outside and I picked a sunny spot for us.

Here's my little lunch plate. I'd ordered a turkey and cranberry sandwich. Tom also got a curried prawn salad and we got two Acme baguettes to pair with the cheese.

Here's our spread of cheese- we'd picked a lot of them. I think 6. I enjoyed my cheddar with dill and herbs, but Tom had picked a mild blue which he stated was his favorite cheese that'd he ever had (and he loves cheese). We did pick a dud- a brie with walnuts which was too bitter to eat, but overall, we had a great meal, which was even better just due to the beautiful surroundings and excellent weather.

After lunch, we headed over to Domaine Chandon, just 10 minutes down the road, for a winery tour. Let me just say that I've been to a handful of wineries in Napa and Domaine Chandon was very impressive and beautiful. It's just built on a gorgeous piece of land and the architecture itself is just lovely. However, the tour was sort of a dud. When you pay someone $7 for a tour, during which they get to promote their brand, restaurant, etc., and have a captive audience, they should at least give people a sample of wine. Instead tastings were an extra $15. While some of our party opted for that choice, Tom and I headed outside and took pics of the lovely surroundings.

After the tour, we headed into downtown Napa to visit COPIA, a food and wine museum. We got there at exactly 3 and found out that they'd just closed since they were having a special event for New Year's eve. So we headed next door to the newly built Oxbow Marketplace. The thing with Oxbow is that it literally just opened. It's a huge building and you can tell it's going to be an amazing place that will showcase local food artisans, but for now, it only has like 6 vendors.

We checked out the olive oil store

and sampled some very good olive oil.

We also visited the organic ice cream shopwhere Tom got an organic root beer (he said it was pretty good) and we shared an ice cream.I actually enjoyed the coffee ice cream quite a bit. And it was served in this funky biodegradable cup with a biodegradable spoon.

We had a couple hours left to burn before dinner. (I had expected to spend that time at COPIA) but we took a trip to Walmart instead and then walked around downtown Napa a bit. Soon it was time to head to dinner. We had early reservations at Pilar, a small restaurant focusing on local ingredients.
Of course with such early reservations we were the first ones at the restaurant. The menu was pretty short and we had already decided what to order while we waited outside for the doors to open. I ordered a crab cake to start. It was pretty good and I especially liked how it was served with the side of fresh grapefruit.

For dinner, I had a chicken dish.Ok honestly, it's been nearly a month now, and I don't remember what was in this. But it was pretty good. Nothing amazing.

And lastly, I finished with some type of warm chocolate mousse, which was truly incorrectly named cause it was more like a warm chocolate cake, though not as good. I didn't finish it (it wasn't worth the calories).After dinner, we drove home, with the idea in our minds that we'd play Monopoly. But we ended up watching Shrek 2 on TV and going to bed by 10:30. Yeah, that's what you do when you're old. We couldn't even manage to stay up until midnight. Overall, we had a lovely New Year's day- a great way to start off the New Year's in our new CA home.